The Casque's Lark Part 14

"How is that, friend Eustace," the captain jokingly remarked to him, "you remain yonder looking at me with crossed arms, while I am engaged in holding back a runaway team?"

"You are strong," Eustace answered; "what aid can the flesh-worm bring to the bull?"

"That man is certainly consumed with jealousy and hatred," I thought to myself at hearing the answer and observing the sullen looks of the captain's friend.

"There is no flesh-worm nor bull in the case, my friend Eustace,"

answered the captain with his habitual joviality and looking rather flattered by the comparison; "but when the flesh-worm and the bull are comrades, then, however strong the latter may be, or small the former, the one does not forsake the other--union makes strength, says the proverb."

"Captain," answered the soldier with a bitter smile, "did I ever forsake you in the hour of danger? Have I not always fought at your side, since we left the forge together?"

"I bear witness to the truth of that," cried Marion cordially, taking Eustace by the hand. "As true as the sword you carry is the last weapon I forged in order to give you a token of friendship, as it is engraved on the blade, you have ever in battle 'marched in my shadow,' as the saying goes in my country."

"What is there strange about that?" replied the soldier. "Beside you, so brave and robust, I was what the shadow is to the body."

"By the devil! Look at the shadow! My friend Eustace!" the captain exclaimed and laughed, and addressing me he added pointing at his companion Eustace:

"Let me have two or three thousand shadows like that, and the first battle that we fight on the other side of the Rhine, I shall bring back a herd of Frankish prisoners."

"You are a captain of renown! I, like so many other poor waifs, are good only to obey, to fight and to be killed. We are only meat for battles,"

replied the old blacksmith with an envious look and his lips slightly losing their color.

"Captain," I said to Marion, "I presume you wish to see Victorin and his mother?"

"Yes, I have a report to render to Victorin of a journey that my friend and I have just made."

"I followed you as a soldier," Eustace said; "the name of an obscure horseman must not be remembered before Victoria the Great."

The captain shrugged his shoulders with impatience and jokingly shook his enormous fist at his friend.

"Captain," I insisted, addressing Marion, "let us hasten to Victoria. I should have been with her since dawn. I am late."

"Friend Eustace," Marion said, starting to walk with me toward Victoria's residence, "will you stay here, or wait for me at our lodging?"

"I shall wait here at the door--that is a subaltern's place."

"Would you believe it, Schanvoch," Marion replied laughing, "would you believe that it is nearly twenty years that lad and I live together and quarrel like two brothers? He will not forget that I am a captain, and will not treat me as a simple anvil-beater, as he formerly used to."

"I am not the only one, Marion, to realize the difference there is between us," Eustace answered. "You are one of the most renowned captains in the army--I am only one of the least of its soldiers."

Saying this Eustace sat down on a stone near the door, and bit his nails.

"He is incorrigible," the captain remarked to me; and we two entered the house of Victoria.

"Captain Marion must be strangely blinded by friendship," I thought to myself, "to fail to perceive that his companion is consumed with malevolent jealousy."

The residence of the Mother of the Camps was extremely simple. Captain Marion having asked one of the soldiers on guard whether Victorin could receive him, the soldier answered that he could give him no information on that head, seeing that the young general had not spent the night in the house.

Despite the camp life, Marion preserved great austerity of morals. He seemed shocked to learn that Victorin had not yet returned home, and he cast a dissatisfied look at me. I wished to excuse Victoria's son, and said to him:

"Let us not be hasty in believing evil. Tetrik, the Governor of Gascony, arrived yesterday at the camp. It may be that Victorin spent the night in conference with him."

"So much the better. I would like to see that young man, who to-day is chief of the Gauls, free himself from the claws of that pest of profligacy that drives so many of us to evil deeds. As to myself, the moment I see a woman's bonnet or a short skirt, I turn my head away as if I saw the devil in person."

"Victorin improves, and he will improve still more with ripening years,"

I replied to the captain. "But what can we do--he is young--he loves pleasure--and pretty girls."

"I also love pleasure, and furiously, too!" exclaimed the good captain.

"There is nothing that I delight more in, when my duties are done, than to enter my lodging and empty a pot of cool beer with my friend Eustace, while we chat over our old trade, or entertain ourselves furbishing our weapons and good armor. Those are real pleasures! And notwithstanding all the excitement that one finds in them, they are absolutely honorable. Let us hope, Schanvoch, that Victorin may some day prefer them to his immodest and diabolical orgies with the pretty girls, that scandalize us."

"I am of your opinion, captain; hope is better than despair. But in the absence of Victorin you may confer with his mother. I shall notify her of your arrival."

Saying this I left Marion alone, and pa.s.sing into a neighboring apartment, encountered a serving-girl who led me to Victoria, the Mother of the Camps, my foster-sister.

CHAPTER IX.

VICTORIA THE GREAT.

I wish, my son, for your benefit and the benefit of our descendants, to trace here the portrait of that ill.u.s.trious Gallic woman, one of the purest glories of our country.

I found Victoria seated beside the cradle of her grandson Victorinin, a handsome boy of two who lay profoundly asleep. Victoria had some needlework in her hands, and was busy sewing, agreeable to her custom as a good housekeeper. She was then, like myself, thirty-eight years of age, but she would have been hardly taken for thirty. In her youth she was appropriately compared to Diana, the huntress. In her mature years she was no less appropriately compared to the antique Minerva. Tall, well built, and virile, without thereby forfeiting the chaste graces of womanhood, she was magnificently shaped. Her beautiful face, instinct with a grave yet gentle expression, bore the impress of majesty under the crown of black hair which she wore in two braids coiled over her august forehead. Sent when still a little girl to a college of our venerated female druids, and having taken at the age of fifteen the mysterious vows that bound her indissolubly to the sacred religion of our fathers, she ever since, and although married, preserved the black garb of the female druids, which was also the habitual garb of the matrons of old Gaul. Her long wide sleeves, open up to the elbows, exposed a pair of arms as white and as strong as those of the valiant Gallic women, who, as you will see in our family narratives, my son, heroically fought the Romans at the battle of Vannes under the eyes of our grandmother Margarid, and preferred death to the disgraces of slavery.

In the middle of the chamber, and not far from the seat occupied by the Mother of the Camps near her grandson's cradle, several rolls of parchment, together with all that was necessary for writing, lay upon a table. From the wall hung the two casques and swords of Victoria's father and husband, both killed in the same battle. One of the two casques was surmounted by the Gallic c.o.c.k of gilt bronze, with his wings partly spread, and holding under his feet a lark that he menaced with his beak. The emblem was adopted by Victoria's father as a military ornament after a heroic combat in which, at the head of only a handful of men, he exterminated a Roman legion that bore a lark on its ensign.

Under the weapons stood a little bra.s.s vase in which seven twigs of mistletoe were arranged. Gaul, you must remember, my son, reconquered her religious liberty in recovering her independence. Close to the bra.s.s vase and the twigs of mistletoe, a druid symbol, was a wooden cross, in commemoration of the death of Jesus of Nazareth, for whom the Mother of the Camps, without being a Christian, professed profound admiration. She looked upon him as one of the sages who shed l.u.s.ter upon humanity.

Such, my son, was Victoria the Great, the ill.u.s.trious Gallic woman whose name our descendants will ever p.r.o.nounce with pride.

When the Mother of the Camps saw me come in, she rose quickly and approached me with gladness, saying in her sonorous and sweet voice:

"Welcome, brother! The mission was a dangerous one. Not seeing you back before sunset, I did not wish to send any message to your house, lest I alarm your wife by showing uneasiness at your prolonged absence. But here you are; I feel happy to see you back again."

Saying this Victoria pressed my hand tenderly in hers.

The words that we spoke must have disturbed the slumber of Victoria's grandson; he moved in his cradle and made a slight sound. Victoria stepped quickly to him, and kissed the child on the forehead. She then sat down, and placing the tip of her foot on a treadle below the cradle, rocked it gently, while she continued her conversation with me.

"And the message?" she asked, "how did the barbarians receive it? Are they ready for peace? Do they want war? Did they accept our proposition?"

I was just about to begin giving my foster-sister a complete account of my mission, when she interrupted me with a gesture, and, reflecting a second, proceeded to say:

"Do you know that my dear relative Tetrik has been here since yesterday?"

"I know it, sister."

"He is due here any moment. I prefer that you make the report to me before him only."

"I shall do so. Can you receive Captain Marion? He came for a conference with Victorin."